The present invention relates to the general field of managing call credits associated with the use of services by terminals.
The context of the invention is more particularly that in which a client device solicits the use of a service on a telecommunications network from a provider of that service.
In the present document, the concept of “service” is to be understood in a broad sense. It covers in particular fixed or mobile telephone services in which a first party sets up a call with a second party via the network. Either or both of the parties can be a service platform.
The concept of service also covers all Internet site access applications, for example for downloading content.
These services have the common feature of using resources of a telecommunications network.
As is known in itself, the use of these resources is billed to the client, for example by the operator of the network or a service platform. To this end, each user or client has a call credit associated with certain uses, this credit being expressed in a specific unit, for example kilobytes for downloading data or time units for telephone calls.
The person skilled in the art also knows this call credit as a “pot” (“godet” in French).
Of course, there can be more than one pot for the same use. For example, with a downloaded game, there can be one pot for the volume downloaded and another pot for the unit cost of the game.
When a client device solicits a service, the telecommunications network allocates it certain resources, which are released when the associated service has been rendered, for example at the end of a telephone call or after downloading a file.
During use, or on releasing the aforementioned network resources, details of the call grouped under the known designation “usage ticket” are recovered and processed by specific components of the communication network with a view to “pricing” the service.
Pricing associates with a use, details of which are given by the usage ticket, a monetary value that generally depends on charging rules of the client's subscription.
Usage tickets associated with a client can be priced as and when they are collected (this is known as “real time” pricing), once a day, or in batches (this is known as “batch” pricing).
As is known in itself, pricing a usage ticket updates the pot or pots relating to that type of use. For example, if a client sends an SMS message, a pot associated with SMS sending is updated, to be more precise decremented by a certain number of units, commensurately decreasing the call credit for sending future SMS messages.
The pots are stored in the centralized information system of the telecommunication operator and managed by centralized pricing software.
This centralized approach gives rise to a certain number of problems, in particular for pricing usage tickets in real time, such processing having to guarantee that the processing time running from the issuing of the usage ticket is limited and minimal, typically less than one second.
Clearly the centralized real-time approach has limitations in terms of performance, especially if the volume of usage tickets increases exponentially, a situation that is very likely to occur with the expansion of high-content services deployed over high-bit-rate networks such as UMTS, ADSL and EDGE networks.
In fact, on each content request, a first ticket is issued for setting up the call, i.e. for the content transport service, and one or more second tickets for obtaining the content as such.
Centralizing the real-time processing of usage tickets in ever greater numbers will inevitably generate increasing costs in terms of calculation and memory resources for operators. Associated with this explosion in demand, it will also be more and more difficult to guarantee real time processing of usage tickets within a limited time.